Archive for ‘Videos’

Having had a lot of fun with the Awesome Comics crew filming the previous episodes, Walter was e-mailing me about doing some other projects. He was working on a holiday video, and was wondering if I wanted to reprise my Lex Luthor from the Nostalgia Critic review of Batman v Superman. It sounded like fun, plus I love hanging out with that crew, so I said heck yes.

It was only a few hours of filming, and Walter didn’t make me put on the makeup again, so wardrobe and clean up were super quick and easy. Plus, the script was hilarious. Walter enjoys playing his comedic version of Zack Synder, and he does a great job of it. Plus, Doug Walker joined and played his Michael Bay character.

Everyone had a fun time filming, and I really enjoyed the final product. I hope Walter keeps me in mind for future videos he wants to do.

Probably my next favorite topic (besides comics) is anime, although I admit to being a casual consumer of the format. That wasn’t always the case. Growing up, I LOVED anime, and would try to get my hands on it anyway that I could. Keep in mind, being the oldest in this video (by many years), coming across anime in my younger days was quite difficult. There wasn’t any Adult Swim, no Cartoon Network or anime on streaming video. You had to find some VHS tapes at the local rental place, and they would never (NEVER) have a complete series of anything. You had to scrape and research and find other local stores to see if they had the next video, or go to cons and try to haggle with the VHS vendors to buy complete sets.

And series would rarely if ever make it to TV. Enter Robotech, and my 4 year old self LOVING the series. It was Transformers with a more mature story, more sophisticated characters, and a reason to watch every episode – because it was one big plot.

Now, I know some people think Robotech isn’t real anime because it was re-edited from multiple series in the states, once Harmony Gold got the rights to it. However, I’ve met the guys who own this series, and have talked to the original creators of the Japanese show. The Japanese creators like the USA show better than what they made. And the Harmony Gold folks have a love for the property that parallels my own. They are also fans. And this gives me hope for more Robotech in the future.

Not long after making my first appearance on Awesome Comics, the crew decided to ask me to host an episode. Of course it was a Halloween episode, but I was late in putting together my costume – so instead, we used studio props to put together our outfits (except for Aiyanna…she came prepared).

I grew up watching Batman ’66, which I really enjoyed. I admit it’s not Batman as he exists in the comics, nor how he’s later been portrayed on TV and film. It’s also not my favorite Batman. However, for the time, it was a fun version of the character that families could come together and enjoy at night. It was like how Lois and Clark isn’t a perfect Superman show, but every week my family was glued to that TV to watch the next episode. It was accessible for kids, fun for families, and because of that will always have a warm place reserved for it in my heart.

That said, I had to moderate the group – who were split into opposing sides. So, naturally, this video was a lot of fun to film.

Back in the day, Awesome Comics reached out to me and asked me to participate in some of their episodes. They handed me a list of their upcoming topics, and I figured – why the heck not start with one about opinions? So I did.

You can see the full video above. My choices are explained in the video, but I caveat these choices by saying I was asked to provide examples of stuff I owned, and most of my comic collection is not with me right now. So I couldn’t pick some of my favorites per se, but was able to pick something a little different and hopefully, make some fans aware of some other creators out there whose work they should check out.

I got an e-mail from Doug around the time Batman v Superman was coming out – a movie I had not seen yet, but one that I had a lot of reservations about when I heard it announced. Warner Bros was so desperate to catch up to where Marvel had gotten over the last several years, they made a mediocre Superman movie (Man of Steel), and then immediately announced the next movie would be the Justice League. Fan reaction to this announcement was…toxic at best…so they went back and said, “Just kidding. It’ll be a Batman and Superman movie. … And also, it’ll have all of the Justice League in it.”

The movie was terrible. Absolute garbage. But I hadn’t seen it at the time I read the script (to avoid spoilers, I tried to just keep to my lines as Lex Luther), but then I walked in while they were filming the scene where they call our Zack Snyder for killing Superman in the second movie. I didn’t really mind the spoiler – I knew the movie was going to suck – and now I knew how much it was going to suck. So much so that even Warner Bros was after a reboot after their second movie. Well done, guys.

Based only on the performance of Jessie Eisenberg from the trailers, I channeled my inner “terrible actor” and threw it into the performance, which Doug loved. I’m not a fan of Jessie Eisenberg nor do I enjoy his movies (Zombieland was pretty cool, though, despite his best efforts). But pretending to be the guy for a night was a lot of fun.

The wig was a huge pain in the butt, though. I haven’t had hair in ages, and the length was just long enough to get in my eyes but too short to tuck behind my ears. It just kept getting in my face and into every shot – but we rolled with it. We made it work. And it was a lot of fun. I only got to interact with Malcolm, which was fun. We were in front of a green screen, but I kept coming up with ways to annoy him with candy.

Eventually they kept adding makeup to me the whole night – which was a pain to wash out. It was just Halloween makeup, though, and they had remover in the studio, so I just kept wiping until it all came off.

What has been your favorite NC review? Who’s your favorite supporting character from the show? And who would you like to see me play next?

This was a fun one. But when Doug reached out to me, I was a little nervous. He told me I’d be playing a Warboy, but they were all shirtless in the movie. Was I going to have to run around with no shirt on for his video?

I immediately hit the gym.

But much to my appreciation, he put me in a white shirt and a thick leather jacket. And thick makeup. That kept coming off, but that’s another story.

Doug’s direction was hilarious: keep up the energy and testosterone. Everything we did involved shouting, head butting, and extreme facial expressions. I even head-butted Doug during a take early in the video, where we needed to get nose-to-nose. But both of us wear glasses normally, so without them we had limited depth perception. So we almost gave each other a bloody nose.

We also did a lot of improve in the car, which was fun. The whole searching for the explodey stick and then saying, “I never learned how to read.” I was happy Doug kept that in. It even showed up for a while in his opening credits.

All in all, this was a very fun video to participate in. And I LOVED the movie, so that made it all the more special.

Doug went through a review month dedicated to The Matrix movies, which was a favorite series of mine (well, the first movie, anyway), but less so for Doug. None-the-less, always on the lookout for a part of for the bald man (and forgetting my inability to memorize dialogue from the Last Airbender review), Doug invited me to be in another of his reviews. This time with a LOT of dialogue, and finally appearing in a scene with Malcolm and Tamara while we were in the room together.

My appearance starts at 22:09 in the video, and it calls back to another favorite movie of mine. I won’t spoil it for you, but if you haven’t seen the movie I’m the reference for, I would recommend changing that. This video would also lead to me doing more dialogue in my appearances with Doug, which is always a fun time.

After appearing in the Dragonbored 5th year movie with Doug Walker, Doug found another role I could help him on: being the tolken bald guy in the Last Airbender review. It was a small role (I show up at 37:40, and only for a few lines), but was still a lot of fun to do. Although, he and I still joke about how terrible I was at memorizing my lines. Which, at only 2-3 lines, it’s a little embarrassing. Because no matter what I did, I couldn’t remember my lines.

A while back, I was approached by Doug Walker (the Nostalgia Critic) to appear in his 5th year movie. He had moved on from the NC, and started doing a series called Demo Reel, and he wanted to take the new skills and techniques he had learned in film making and apply them to a new flick that wouldn’t involve all of the Channel Awesome reviewers. Co-written by his brother, Rob Walker, this movie was about an office employee who obsessed over playing a video game called Dragonbored. However, one day the character he created comes into our world and starts throwing a wrench into his life!

I played the game company CEO, appearing at the very beginning of the film in an interview, as well as in a post-credit scene. It was a lot of fun to do, and we did a lot of improv during that filming session. Doug had a few important talking points for me to hit, but otherwise said I could say basically whatever I wanted to keep the energy high and make people want to play this game. I did just that – and did a lot of swearing – which you can see some of the outtakes in the blooper reel, below!